"It's really nice to create something rather than just consume – so many people just use other people's stuff," says 12-year-old Milo Piccini Noble. Keen to show off the tic-tac-toe game he has made, Milo challenges me to beat his computer. I fail miserably. "Perhaps I should adjust the level," he says kindly. "It took me a week to make, and I put in three difficulty levels."

Milo is one of six young people aged 11-17 ensconsed for five days amid laptops and wires in an office at Spike Island, Bristol's arts and media hub. It's where Mark Wales, from the web development company Small Hadron Collider, has volunteered to teach coding skills as part of the nationwide summer coding camp Young Rewired State, now in its third year.

Three days in, the group has already created a program that uses the height and weight of each Olympic competitor to work out their body mass index and see what proportion are technically underweight, overweight and obese. Today they are pulling data from the web to create a medal table that updates automatically.

Is coding difficult? "Initially, but only because it is very strict," says Alexi Siddiqui, 14. "There's just a lot to remember," adds his friend, Ben Coleclough, also 14. "But when you've made something, it's yours," nods Alexi. "You can share stuff you've made on the internet," adds Jack Baron, 12. "Or your stuff can be linked." Having other people showing that they like his work clearly makes him feel good.

These young people are ahead of the game. Learning how to use Microsoft Office is of little interest when, as Alexi says, it's more satisfying to "make things to find out how it works". But they're in a minority. In an O2 survey of 1,000 young people carried out this month for the Guardian, just a quarter said they had learned any computer coding at school – 33% of boys and just 17% of girls. Only 6% said they had had a go with a Raspberry Pi – the credit card-sized device that has been heralded by many as the great hope for coding.

The national curriculum for ICT has been suspended as of this September after the education secretary, Michael Gove, said it was "demotivating and dull". In September 2014, the DfE intends to publish the new ICT curriculum at the same time as the revised curriculum for other subjects. But in the two years till then, how are children who have poor access to computers and computer science expertise in school going to be served, when teachers, it seems, are now struggling to understand what they should be teaching in this subject area?

It's been just over six months since the Guardian teamed up with Google to launch its campaign promoting digital literacy. This followed criticism from Google's chief executive, Eric Schmidt, that the ICT curriculum gave pupils no insight into how software is made. Other voices in industry still agree: last week Mike Short, president of the Institution of Engineering and Technology, said that computer science must be taught as a subject in schools or the UK could lose its globally competitive position.

However, teachers are increasingly anxious that without official guidance on what children should be learning, they may do things wrong. "Teachers' confidence varies to a large degree," says Nigel Hooton, ICT leader at St Peter's primary school in Romford. "[It] will depend on who is in your school. Teaching ICT is a statutory requirement, but there is no more official statutory programme of study. I think there may be a bit of a vacuum."

Some teachers who have the skills are already using their newfound freedoms. Darren Kelly, curriculum leader for ICT at Blatchington Mill secondary school in Hove, has written a curriculum for his key stage 3 pupils. But he acknowledges that his school has unusually high numbers of teachers with some form of computing background. "There is some alarm in other schools that they don't have this kind of skill," he says.

Even for Kelly, who works in a specialist ICT school, the fact that there is no statutory guidance on what to teach is "very daunting". "You do expect some framework and guidance to follow," he says. "We could get to 2014 and find that everything we've been working on is not what they want us to do."

Another serious concern, says primary ICT adviser Jodie Lopez Collins, is that though schools already confident in their skills may fly, "the gap will widen between them and those that aren't". The suspension of the ICT curriculum and Gove's accompanying vision of pupils learning to program "ignores the fact that the majority of teachers aren't able to teach digital literacy in any depth," she says. "And the schools that aren't doing very much will think they don't have to bother because there are now no defined requirements."

Lopez Collins believes teachers are being poorly served by messages about ICT that are wildly at odds with other directions they have to follow. "Gove and [Nick] Gibb talk about embedding ICT across the curriculum," she says, "but when you look at the new literacy and numeracy framework, it seems to be going backwards; just a couple of mentions [of ICT] but not giving it a fundamental role."

Learning to code should not be an end in itself, says Conrad Wolfram, founder of Computer-Based Math, who is judging the final projects made by Young Rewired State participants. "I've argued that programming should be part of the primary maths curriculum," he says. Learning to code should be seen in the same way as learning the skill of handwriting so children can then use it as a tool for solving problems in a wider context. At a deeper level, he says, children need to "learn to conceptualise the problem they're creating the code to solve. It's actually very creative."

There has been some progress, says Peter Dickman, engineering manager at Google who advises the Computing At School, a grassroots organisation of teachers, supported by industry and academics. "Exam boards have been producing new [computer science] GCSEs, put together this year since the Guardian/Google campaign started," he says.

For teachers who are desperate for some support in what they should be doing, Computing At School offers a detailed programme of study created just last year for KS3 and KS4. "It's not the only way," he acknowledges, "but it is an option."

Industry, naturally, is entering the fray as schools try to work out a plan. Last month O2 piloted its first Think Big school in Leeds, a day-long event that gave 40 pupils aged 14-16 the chance to create websites and use technology to dream up new business ideas. Google is funding 100 teachers on a six-week computer science training course through Teach First.

Lopez Collins knows what she'd like to see in the revised curriculum: "We need ICT embedded in the other curriculums, that you have to have completed certain tasks, and there is a more evolved computer science option," she says.

However, she warns that the teaching skills simply don't exist yet on the scale required to deliver this in every school. "I worry that I see job ads for computer science/ICT teachers that say you also have to be the business studies teacher – it goes back to it being all Word, Excel and PowerPoint."

Come 2014, Dickman says, he'd like to see "not too much prescription, lots of constructive guidance and lots of useable examples, because it's not reasonable to expect a teacher with a full teaching load to completely rewrite all their materials."

With support, young people are often happy to teach themselves. Back at Spike Island, the children look surprised when asked how they manage if they get stuck. "Most of the time I look it up on the internet," says Jack.